[vbox-dev] New OS bring up with Vbox ?

[Klaus Espenlaub]

phi gcc schrieb:
> On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 11:25 AM, Klaus Espenlaub
> <Klaus.Espenlaub at sun.com> wrote:
>> phi gcc wrote:
>>> Hi Klaus,
>>>
>>> Thanx for the ideas.
>>> I am look at various way, and your ideas are good indeed. I try to
>>> minimise the weel re-invention.
>> Please stay on the list... that way more people can contribute and learn.
> 
> I missed the reply all, here is the copy of our exchange.
> 
> 
>> Sounds easily possible... one way avoiding the raw file/vdi conversion would
>> be to use a (software) iSCSI target. VirtualBox supports this, presenting it
>> as a regular disk to the guest OS.
> 
> Very good point, I will loo at it.
> 
>> You must be careful of course, as (potentially) sharing disks this way is
>> not safe at all ;)
> 
> Indeed, I use iScsi already for other purpose :)
> 
> 
>> Forget it - hand crafting a saved state is nearly impossible. It contains
>> the detailed state of the CPU, memory and all devices. Getting the latter
>> right is nearly impossible.
> 
> May be I misunderstood the concept of a snapshot, I thought it was the
> ability from teh host to take an image of all the resource save it and
> resume from that state later. In my case I would craft 'snapshoot'
> with no 'device' setup as the going to be booted OS would redo the
> devices discovery and init.

If you build a bootable VDI you don't need snapshots...

Snapshots preserve a particular VM state (disk contents and optionally 
the state of the running VM). This made me interpret your ideas as 
trying to construct the state of a running VM so that it appears as if 
your OS was already loaded etc - and while that would be a really cool 
stunt it's orders of magnitude more difficult than to hack up a boot 
loader so that it does what you need.

>>> The idea is that I'd like to have guest kernel crashdump efficently.
>> That sounds feasible - with custom changes to VirtualBox of course.
> 
> Hum, I looked a bit into this, downloaded the vbox src and loaded all
> the debian packages as said in the man and the build failed, I guess I
> got to learn a bit more about using the vbox API for implemented
> things and later 'may be' expand vbox capabilities :)

The learning curve is very steep for everyone... normally build problems 
can be easily solved though. Often it is just a build package dependency 
we forgot to mention.

> 
> Thanx for your sugestions.
> Cheers,
> Phi